BT expands Cloud portfolio with data cente investment

BT has announced an additional investment in its data centre capacity to meet the increasing demand from large UK-based organisations for sustainable, secure and compliant cloud-based services. The investment is part of BT’s cloud of clouds vision aimed at helping large organisations — such as those in the UK public sector — connect easily and securely to the applications and data they need, regardless of where they are hosted.

The company has signed an agreement to use data centre specialist Ark Data Centre’s two highly secure and sustainable sites in the south of England. BT will leverage the data centres to develop new managed cloud services for UK organisations where enhanced security is paramount, such as central and local government, defence and security, police and health.

The capability the two new data centres offer adds to the company’s existing BT Compute portfolio of cloud services, which span public, private and hybrid clouds through to traditional telehousing and colocation services.

BT already manages large, secure cloud infrastructures across the public and private sectors for organisations with varying needs. These include global financial markets, with the BT Radianz Clou — the world’s largest secure networked financial community, BT Connected Science — a cloud-based collaboration platform for the global pharmaceutical industry and BT Compute for Health — a secure managed hosting service tailored to the UK health market that can support secure applications containing patient identifiable information.

The new data centres feature stringent levels of physical security and are complemented by cutting-edge technology and a risk management system that complies with the ISO 27001 standard. Both data centres conform to Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) OFFICIAL standards with additional levels of security available.

The data centres are some of the most environmentally efficient in the country, with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2 compared to an industry average of 1.7, according to the Uptime Institute*. Ark has also committed to using green energy to power the data centres, which complements BT’s pledge to use renewable electricity in the UK. These data centres will contribute to BT’s efforts to help its customers cut carbon emissions related to their business.

Neil Lock, vice president, BT Compute, BT Global Services, said: “Organisations in all industries are embracing the need for greater innovation through digital strategies that rely on cloud services. This is especially true for public sector bodies faced with the complex challenge of transforming services sustainably with increasingly tight budgets.

“By adding two new data centres to our BT Compute portfolio that comply with the latest government security guidelines, we believe that we have the ideal platform on which to innovate. We already deliver some great cloud services to our government, finance and pharma sector customers. Our latest investment builds on this strength to help us realise our cloud of clouds vision for large organisations.”

The two new data centres are fully integrated in BT’s cloud of clouds vision, already supported by more than 20 cloud-enabled facilities across five continents, with a further 30 data centres from third party cloud service providers connected to its network. For CIOs, cloud of clouds is a practical, efficient and secure route into cloud computing that meets their needs for choice, flexibility and compliance along with a supplier who knows how to make it all work together.